A Look Back at the Southwest Conference

For much of its 82 years, the Southwest Conference gloried in its distinction as the most tightly knit league in major college sports. Its excitement and energy generated from deep in the heart of Texas.

Break-up of the Southwest Conference

Ironically, the SWC's original strength became its fatal weakness. In the '90s, large athletic programs couldn't meet multimillion-dollar budgets, much less thrive, without significant television revenue from football or basketball. The SWC had neither.

By 1994, league members realized a break-up was inevitable. The SWC was torn and tarnished by football recruiting scandals and NCAA probations, which hit all Texas members except Baylor and Rice in the '80s and saw SMU's program suspended for two years when hit by the NCAA "Death Penalty." The conference was further weakened in 1992 when Arkansas withdrew. A charter member and the SWC's only non-Texas school, Arkansas jumped to the more prosperous, more diverse and more widely-spread Southeastern Conference.

Arkansas coach Frank Broyles, left, and UT coach Darrell Royal after the Texas 15-14 win over the Razorbacks in 1969. Photo from Texas Sports Hall of Fame.

In an earlier era, the SWC and SEC enjoyed similar prestige and success. Now the SEC had left the SWC far behind. It produced national contenders annually and TV paid big money to cover its games. The 9-state SEC, boasting 18 percent of the nation's TV sets, delivered a much larger audience to watch a network's coverage – and its commercials. The all-Texas SWC had only 6.7 percent of the nation's TV sets.

The College Football Association, composed of a majority of major conferences and independents, had given the SWC exposure and revenue through its contracts with ABC and ESPN, but now it was dissolving. The SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big East landed handsome network deals, but the SWC was too small to attract a buyer.

SWC hopes for a merger with the Big Eight to form a 16-team "super conference" died quickly. The Big Eight, composed strictly of state-supported schools in six states with 8.1 percent of America's TV sets, wanted only the SWC's four strongest football members in a new league.

Where the Teams Went

Thus Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and one private institution, Baylor, moved to the Big 12 Conference in the fall of 1996. They joined Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, SWC charter members who left the league during its first decade, in the South Division. Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State and Iowa State formed the North Division.

Texas, A&M, Tech and Baylor seemingly fulfilled a best-case scenario. Their four SWC brethren just had to do the best they could. The three other private schools – SMU, TCU and Rice – joined the far-flung Western Athletic Conference, which expanded to 16 schools for 1996. Although SMU and Rice were based in Dallas and Houston, two of the nation's largest TV markets, their fan support had dwindled to a few thousand loyalists since professional sports first arrived in their cities in 1960. The WAC gambled on turn-arounds at both schools. The Big 12 didn't have to bother.

Houston, a state school also suffering from anemic attendance in a pro-dominated market, joined the new Conference USA. It was a 12-school league with apparently more emphasis on basketball than football. In football, it's a second-tier league with only seven members: Houston, Alabama-Birmingham, Memphis, Tulane, Cincinnati, Southern Mississippi and Louisville. In basketball, it could be a national force. The SWC's final year of competition was 1995-96, but its demise actually began in 1960 when pro football's arrival first drew fans away from Rice and SMU in the league's largest markets.

Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles, whose ties with the SWC spanned 46 years before he led the Razorbacks into the SEC in '92, was saddened by his old league's collapse but believed it was inevitable. "There was no magic formula to turn the tide back to Rice and SMU being the kingpins in attendance like they were in the old days," Broyles said. "There was no way to turn the clock back. How do you get the pride back in a conference with probations and a lack of attendance?"

So the league that sprang from the first organizational meeting in May 1914 at the Oriental Hotel in Dallas ended with the completion of the SWC baseball tournament and track-and-field championships at Lubbock in May 1996. The SWC, like the Oriental Hotel, is now history. But over the long haul, it's a proud history, gleaming with famous names and achievements.

The Championships and the Champions

Football, the premier sport from start to finish, produced seven national champions: SMU, 1935; TCU, 1938; Texas A&M, 1939; Arkansas, 1964; and Texas, 1963, 1969 and 1970. Those three UT national titles were the gems of Darrell Royal's 20 years as Longhorns coach, a career which saw him post the SWC's best winning percentage of .774 (167-47-5).

D.X. Bible, who hired Royal to restore UT's football glory just before he retired as the school's athletic director, also earned a unique place in SWC history. He was the only man who served as head coach at A&M and UT, the league's fiercest rivals. Bible was 72-19-9 in 11 years at A&M (1917, 1919-28) and returned to the SWC after eight years at Nebraska to coach Texas to a 63-31-3 record in 10 years, 1937-46. Bible's 21-year SWC coaching record was .716.

In other sports, SWC schools won a total of 55 national championships. Most notable were Texas' winning the NCAA College World Series four times (1949, 1950, 1975, 1983) and two outstanding women's basketball champions: Texas (34-0) in 1986 and Texas Tech, led by Player of the Year Sheryl Swoopes, in 1993.

The SWC boasted more than 350 first-team all-America athletes in football, basketball and baseball alone. Its track-and-field stars included three historic Olympians. Baylor's Michael Johnson scored the rarest of doubles in 1996, winning both the 200 and 400 at the Atlanta Games to cap a career-best year in which he set world records in both races. In 1984, Houston's Carl Lewis became the first Olympian to win four gold medals in one Games since Jesse Owens in 1936 and added five more golds in the 1988, 1992 and 1996 Olympics. Texas A&M shot putter Randy Matson, the first ever to throw past 70 feet, won the gold in 1968 and held the world record longer than anyone in history. In the fall of 1996, the final eight SWC members scattered to their new conferences. The football season lacked excellence on all fronts until Texas, winner of a mediocre South Division, faced two-time national champion Nebraska in the Big 12 championship game at St. Louis. The Longhorns, 20-and-one-half-point underdogs, stunned the Cornhuskers with their imaginative, gambling play to win the first Big 12 title, 37-27.

Anyone who remembered the excitement of the SWC at its best sure got their kicks that day.

— from the Texas Almanac 1998-1999, by Sam Blair, who covered the Southwest Conference in his 41 years with The Dallas Morning News.

Southwest Conference Champions, 1915-1996

The Southwest Athletic Conference was organized in 1914. Charter members included the University of Texas, Texas A&M University, Baylor University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) University, Southwestern University of Georgetown and Rice University. Southern Methodist University joined the conference in 1918; Texas Christian University was added in 1923; Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University) joined in 1958; and the University of Houston was accepted for membership in 1971. Phillips University of Enid, Okla., participated in the conference in 1920. Oklahoma and Oklahoma A&M dropped out in the mid-'20s, and Southwestern quit after 1916.

Below are listed the winning teams in baseball, basketball, Cross Country, football, golf, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track & field and volleyball from 1915 through the Southwest Conference's final season in 1996.

In women's basketball, both a regular-season champion and a tournament champion were recognized. This was also the case in men's and women's tennis starting in 1988. In the list below, an asterisk (*) denotes the tournament champion. In cases where the tournament champion was not the regular-season champion or one of the co-champions, the tournament champion's name is in parentheses following the name of the regular-season champion.

In this list, the schools are abbreviated as follows:

The University of Texas at Austin

Texas

Texas A&M University

A&M

Baylor University

Baylor

Texas Christian University

TCU

University of Houston

Houston

Rice University

Rice

Texas Tech University

Texas Tech

Southern Methodist University

SMU

University of Arkansas

Arkansas

University of Oklahoma

Okla.

Oklahoma A&M University

Okla. A&M

Source: From 1915 through 1983, the list is taken from the 1984-1985 Texas Almanac. The 1984-1996 records are from the Southwest Conference Records Book, compiled by SWC Media Relations staff.